Menticulture Blog

Generative vs reductive

Further to the attraction of Ian Bogost's definiton of system and unit operations, which are each respectively top-down and bottom-up tools of analysis, is the fact that the unit operation he articulates is procedural rather than descriptive.

So just as structuralist analysis is reductionist while post-structuralist analysis is productive, so system operations are like 'black box' simplifications, while unit operations are transformative and generative. Not unlike the comparison between scientific and metaphorical ways of thinking I described a while back in terms of understanding the lives and evolution of cities.